Near the end of the Reconstruction, he was elected as 77th Governor of South Carolina, serving 1876-1879, and later was elected as a U.S. Senator. His election as governor was marked by extensive violence by the Red Shirts, a paramilitary group that served the Democratic Party to work to disrupt elections and suppress black voting in the state. They contributed to the Democrats regaining control of the state government.

Hampton grew up in a wealthy planter family, receiving private instruction. He had four younger sisters. His was an active outdoor life; he rode horses and hunted, especially at his family's North Carolina summer retreat, High Hampton.[2] The youth was known for taking hunting trips alone into the woods, hunting American black bears with only a knife. Some accounts credit him with killing as many as 80 bears.[3]

In 1836 Hampton graduated from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina), and was trained for the law, although he never practiced. His father assigned certain plantations to him for his management in South Carolina and Mississippi.[1] The younger man also became active in state politics.

He was elected to the South Carolina General Assembly in 1852 and served as a Senator from 1858 to 1861. After Hampton's father died in 1858, the son inherited his vast fortune, the plantations, and one of the largest holdings of slaves in the South.

Although Hampton was conservative on issues of secession and slavery, and he had opposed the division of the Union as a legislator, when war began, he was loyal to his state. He resigned from the Senate and enlisted as a private in the South Carolina Militia; however, the governor of South Carolina insisted that Hampton accept a colonel's commission, although he had no military experience at all. Like in northern regiments, the elite were commissioned based on their social standing. Hampton organized and partially financed the unit known as "Hampton's Legion", which consisted of six companies of infantry, four companies of cavalry, and one battery of artillery. He personally financed all of the weapons for the Legion.

Despite his lack of experience and relatively advanced age of 42, Hampton was a natural cavalryman—brave, audacious, and already a superb horseman. Of officers without previous military experience, he was one of two to achieve the rank of lieutenant general (the other being Nathan Bedford Forrest).

Hampton first saw combat in July 1861, at the First Battle of Bull Run, where he deployed his Legion at a decisive moment, giving the brigade of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson time to reach the field. He was wounded the first of five times during the war when he led a charge against a federal artillery position, and a bullet creased his forehead.

After the Peninsula Campaign, General Robert E. Lee reorganized his cavalry forces as a division under the command of J.E.B. Stuart, who selected Hampton as his senior subordinate, to command one of two cavalry brigades. During the winter of 1862, around the Battle of Fredericksburg, Hampton led a series of cavalry raids behind enemy lines and captured numerous prisoners and supplies without suffering any casualties, earning a commendation from General Lee. In November 1862, he captured 137 men of the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry at Hartwood Presbyterian Church.[4] During the Battle of Chancellorsville, Hampton's brigade was stationed south of the James River, so saw no action.

In the Gettysburg Campaign, Hampton was slightly wounded in the Battle of Brandy Station, the war's largest cavalry battle. His brigade then participated in Stuart's wild adventure to the northeast, swinging around the Union army and losing contact with Lee. Stuart and Hampton reached the vicinity of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, late on July 2, 1863. While just outside of town, Hampton was confronted by a Union cavalryman pointing a rifle at him from 200 yards. Hampton charged the trooper before he could fire his rifle, but another trooper blindsided Hampton with a saber cut to the back of his head. On July 3, Hampton led the cavalry attack to the east of Gettysburg, attempting to disrupt the Union rear areas, but colliding with Union cavalry. He received two more saber cuts to the front of his head, but continued fighting until he was wounded again with a piece of shrapnel to the hip. He was carried back to Virginia in the same ambulance as General John Bell Hood.

On August 3, 1863, Hampton was promoted to major general and received command of a cavalry division. His wounds from Gettysburg were slow in healing, so he did not actually return to duty until November. During the Overland Campaign of 1864, Stuart was killed at the Battle of Yellow Tavern and Hampton was given command of the Cavalry Corps on August 11, 1864. He distinguished himself in his new role at the bloody Battle of Trevilian Station, defeating Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan's cavalry, and in fact, lost no cavalry battles for the remainder of the war. In September, Hampton conducted what became known as the "Beefsteak Raid", where his troopers captured over 2400 head of cattle and over 300 prisoners behind enemy lines.

In October 1864, near Petersburg, Virginia, Hampton sent his son, Thomas Preston, a lieutenant and an aide to his father, to deliver a message. Shortly afterward, Hampton and his other son, Wade IV, rode in the same direction. Before traveling 200 yards, they came across Preston's body, and as young Wade dismounted, he was also shot. Thomas Preston died from his wound.[5]

While Lee's army was bottled up in the Siege of Petersburg, in January 1865, Hampton returned to South Carolina to recruit additional soldiers. He was promoted to lieutenant general on February 14, 1865, but eventually surrendered to the Union along with General Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee at Bennett Place in Durham, North Carolina. Hampton was reluctant to surrender, and nearly got into a personal fight with Union Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick (often called "Kill-Cavalry") at the Bennett Farm.

After the war, Hampton suffered devastating financial losses. His boyhood home, Millwood, near Columbia, was burned by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's Union soldiers. He later was expected to spend monies to help supply Union soldiers during Reconstruction. The large number of people he had enslaved were freed, and though Hampton retained land, his overseers found it more difficult to turn a profit in a system requiring laborers to be paid for their work. Together with Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early, Hampton became a proponent of the Lost Cause movement. He worked to explain the Confederacy's loss of the war, and deeply regretted the loss of his secure life before the war. He strongly resented the use of black Federal troops by the Federal government as occupying units in the state during Reconstruction.

Wade Hampton

Hampton was offered the nomination for governor in 1865, but refused because he felt Northerners would be suspicious of a former Confederate general seeking political office only months after the end of the Civil War. Hampton campaigned to ask supporters not to vote for him in the gubernatorial election. In 1868, he became the chairman of the state Democratic Party central committee. That year, the Radical Republicans took the election.

He essentially ceased most overt political activity until 1876. Like many other elite Southerners, Hampton gave tacit support to the Ku Klux Klan, which had independent chapters of insurgents arising throughout the South. He helped raise money for legal defense funds after the Federal government started to enforce anti-Klan legislation to suppress the violence of its members against freedmen and white Republicans. He was not known to have active involvement within the organization.[6] Hampton supported Matthew Calbraith Butler in the Union Reformcampaign of 1870.

Other insurgent groups formed to replace the KKK. In South Carolina and other states, groups of men calling themselves "rifle clubs" formed to act as law enforcement in the years after the war. Since the mid-1870s, the Democratic paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts had developed chapters in most South Carolina counties (they had originated in Mississippi), and were not dissimilar to rifle clubs. These groups acted as "the military arm of the Democratic Party."[7] These armed supporters of Hampton openly disrupted Republican meetings and worked to suppress black voting in the state by violence and intimidation.[8] By 1876, there were estimated to be 20,000 men who were members of rifle clubs in the state.[9]

Hampton opposed the Radical Republican Reconstruction policies in the South. He re-entered South Carolina politics in 1876, running in opposition to Reconstruction. Hampton, a Democrat, ran against Republican incumbent governor Daniel Henry Chamberlain.

Hampton used Grace Peixotto's "Big Brick House", a prominent brothel located at 11 Fulton Street in Charleston, to assure complete privacy for the Red Shirts' meetings; it mainly served as campaign headquarters.[10] The 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election is thought to be the bloodiest in the history of the state. The Red Shirts had used violence and intimidation in every county to suppress black Republican voting. "An anti-Reconstruction historian later estimated that 150 Negroes were murdered in South Carolina during the campaign."[11]

Both parties claimed victory. For over six months, there were two legislatures in the state, both claiming to be authentic. Eventually, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled Hampton was the winner of the election. The election of the first Democratic governor in South Carolina since the end of the Civil War, as well as the national election of Rutherford B. Hayes as President, signified the end of Reconstruction in the South. In 1877 the US government withdrew its troops from the South.

After the election, Hampton became known as the "Savior of South Carolina". He was reelected in 1878; the Red Shirts gave support but less violence was required.[8] Two days later, he was thrown from a mule while deer hunting and broke his right leg. Several weeks later, his right leg was amputated due to complications arising from this injury.

In 1890, Hampton's niece Caroline, an operating room nurse, married William Halsted, later known as the "father of American surgery" for his contributions. He had developed the surgical glove to try to protect Caroline's skin from the harsh surgical sterilization chemicals.[citation needed]

To honor Hampton for his leadership in the Civil War and the "redemption" of the state from Reconstruction-era reforms, the General Assembly created Hampton County from Beaufort County in 1878. The town of Hampton Courthouse, later shortened to Hampton, was incorporated on December 23, 1879, to serve as the county seat of Hampton County.

In 1913, Judge John Randolph Tucker named the Wade Hampton Census Area in Alaska to commemorate his father-in-law (it was renamed Kusilvak Census Area in 2015).[15] An artillery battery was named after Wade Hampton at Fort Crockett, built on Galveston Island, Texas. The Wade Hampton Battery was one of four coastal artillery batteries and contained two 10-inch guns. During World War II, the SS Wade Hampton, a Liberty ship named in honor of the general, was sunk off the coast of Greenland by a German U-boat.

In Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara's first husband, Charles Hamilton, serves in Hampton's regiment, dying of measles only seven weeks later. As was fashionable (according to Mitchell) to name baby boys after their fathers' commanding officers, Scarlett's son by Charles is named Wade Hampton Hamilton.

Wade Hampton and his sons appear in Merritt P. Allen’s novel Johnny Reb, published in 1952. The novel begins just before the war and depicts Hampton’s style and character. The book chronicles the adventures of the Hamptons in Hampton’s Legion; it includes the Beefsteak Raid, the incident of Wade Hampton engaging the Union sniper and the death of his son Preston.